Losing Utopia

From Cold War to the War on Terrorism. I've been thinking about the loss of utopia, the way that the very term 'utopia' seems today to be a criticism or dismissal, a charge of inflexibility, impracticality, or dogmatism. But I don't see it this way. I think of utopias as possibilities, as openings to the chance that things might be other than they are, that they might be better. The loss of a utopia appears today in the US in the sense that the US is the 'greatest country on earth.' Another way of reading such claims (along with attestations of America's divine mission etc), is as an indication of a loss, the loss of the ability to imagine a different present or a different future.

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We hear that America's freedom is under attack, that we are hated because we are free. The fantasy of the Islamic fundamentalist gaze looks a lot like the American Christian fundamentalist gaze, a gaze that sees the world in terms of good and evil, a gaze that Bush and company see as looking down at them.  Hence, looking from the fantasy of a world of truth and righteousness, America's fragile freedoms become America's dangers--and security, militarism, and unilateralism, a confidence in one's convictions befitting those who employ terrorist tactics, take the place of civil liberties.

For more on this: Download utopia_and_identification.doc.   

Comments

[ozric]

a good read with lots of gazing but still the idea of giving the cold war american and soviet states a utopian dimension seems shall we say crypto-stalinist...in contrast started wallerstein's the decline of american power yesterday which is from the left that recognizes in his terms 'the world revolution of 1968' as a new point of departure after the failure of the old left...this counterpunch review describes the book probably better than anything else around although its the first one i read http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman01032004.html

[Jodi]

The review is interesting--I'll look at the book. thanks!

[ozric]

here's the development of an intellectual position by immanuel wallerstein http://www.yale.edu/socdept/faculty/wallerstein.html